The ultrasound endoscopic probes with very small size transducers are normally imaging by focused ultrasound beamforming technology. So the imaging frame rate is not very high, which cannot meet the needs of some clinical applications based on high imaging rate. In recent years, plane-wave ultrafast imaging technology can obtain high image frame rate and guarantee the image quality. In this paper, a plane wave ultra-fast imaging technique based on a home-made small line array ultrasound transducer is presented. Feasibility of the method is verified by simulation estimations and phantom experiments. The results show that for the small size transducer design of plane wave ultrafast imaging, it is necessary to fully consider the combination of the array element width and the number of array elements. So that a good plane wave imaging quality can be obtained. It lays a foundation for the ultra-fast imaging of plane wave in the interventional ultrasound imaging and ultrasound endoscopy.
Keywords: ultrafast imaging; ultrasound plane-wave; ultrasound transducer.